Sending attachments in an email is something very basic, and simple, when it comes to communicating with others. All email servers allow us to send attachments, and receive emails with other attachments, as long as we do not exceed their limits or capacity. gmail It is one of the most widely used email servers in the world. But it has serious restrictions when it comes to sending and receiving attachments. Luckily, it is very easy to avoid these limits.
If we are thinking of sending an attachment through Gmail, we must bear in mind that this email client it only allows us to send up to 25 MB attachments in the mail. If we try to attach more than that capacity, it will directly return an error indicating that we cannot send an email with that size.
In addition, this email has strict restrictions on the types of files that we can send attached, a controversial measure, but necessary, in order to preserve the security of users and reduce the number of computer attacks that take place by email.
If we do not usually send and receive files by email, almost certainly these limitations do not matter much to us. But if you often use email to share files with other people, and especially if you’ve ever hit the 25MB limit, there’s a way to send much larger files.
Use Google Drive to share files
When we write an email, next to the button to attach a file, we can find a Google Drive icon. Thanks to it we will be able to attach the files we want, up to a maximum of 10 GB, directly from the cloud. In this way, we can easily bypass the 25 MB restrictions, as well as many of the restrictions of certain types of files that we cannot send attachments by email.
When the recipient receives the email, they will see the attached files as if they were included in the email itself, but in reality it will be a link to Google Drive. Clicking on it will download the files directly from the message sender’s cloud.
This gives us several advantages. The first one is that the files will not take up space in our inbox. Nor in the output tray of the issuer. Therefore, we avoid wasting storage space in Google accounts. Also, we can use Google Drive security measureswhich is in charge of analyzing the files in search of malware to make sure that they are clean.
What if I have to send more than 10 GB via Gmail?
This is already an extreme case. We sure have never had to send more than 10 GB in the mail. However, if the situation arises (for example, when sharing a very large project), we must know that we will not be able to do it either through Gmail or as a Google Drive attachment.
In that case, what we have to do is find an alternative that does allow us to share these files. For example, we can upload them to OneDrive, if we have Microsoft 365, since we have up to 1 TB of space to store all kinds of data in the cloud. Or we can also use other tools, such as Mega, which allow us to have up to 50 GB for free.
And even if we have a NAS or home server at home, we can use it to share files from there.
